0 comments
Leave your comments

Politics: Pro-choice demonstrations erupt in Italy.

Pro-abortion demonstrations were held in Rome, Bologna, Florence and Naples on 14 February after a woman who had undergone an abortion in a Naples hospital was questioned by police earlier in the week. Around 4,000 women attended the Rome rally. The woman terminated her pregnancy legally in the 21st week after doctors had diagnosed the fetus with Klinefelter syndrome, which can cause mental handicaps. However, a telephone call was made from inside the hospital alerting police to an ‘infanticide’ and officers arrived to investigate, taking away medical records and the aborted fetus for tests. Pro-choice supporters maintain that the incident was an intrusion of privacy indicative of the “witch hunt” climate women choosing to have abortions face in the country. Over the last week abortion has emerged as an election issue for parties jostling for votes ahead of the snap general elections in April. Conservative journalist Giuliano Ferrara has said he will stand in the polls on his own anti-abortion ticket, and although centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi has distanced himself from Ferrara, earlier in the week the ex-premier, tipped by many to win the next election, said he supported the idea of a United Nations moratorium on abortions where the right to life was respected “from conception until natural death”. Under a 1978 Italian law upheld in a 1981 referendum, elective abortion is legal until the end of the third month, but abortions after the third month can take place for health reasons. Abortions in Italy have dropped dramatically in the last 25 years. Around 130,000 abortions were carried out in 2006, the last year for which statistics are available, compared to 235,000 in 1982, according to the Istituto superiore di sanità.

back